RS300 transom

 A friend of mine suffered the same fate and sent the boat off to Winder. I have a feeling the repair was the best part of £500, however, most of his transom had gone!

Don't use epoxy on a polyester built boat.

Carbon and peel ply are unnecessary.

Other than that Jim's description should work

You need
angle grinder
carbon cloth (check the class rules don't get funny about carbon repairs though)
some cheap glass (even chopped stand matt OK)
epoxy resin
peel ply
parcel tape
several pairs disposable gloves
sharp scissors your mother doesn't want again.

There are lots of ways of doing this, but I think I'd make a little mould...

Remove rudder fitting.

Put your broken off piece back, cover the entire area with parcel tape, and using your cheap glass make a moulding over the area. This needs to be pretty thick to be solid, use about 10 layers of the stuff. Leave to cure, then pull off. You'll use this later to get everything level. Cover it with parcel tape.

Now take the broken bit off. Using a small angle grinder or a file grind back the laminate. You want to start just below the top screw holes of the rudder fitting (these are best left untouched so you can locate the fitting) and grind back so that it is chamfered getting to all the way through at the crack. You should end up with a vaguely oval area of decreasing thickness of laminate. Leave parcel tape on all the surrounding structure.

Now take carbon cloth. You will use several layers of this to fill back the area you've ground out. Each layer a bit larger than the next. Measure up each piece, wet it out with epoxy, and put it on. Each successive layers should have the fibres at 45 degrees to the one before, eg one cross wise, one up and down, one crosswise etc It will compress down enormously when you've finished, so should be well above the local surface as you put the last layers on. I wouldn't be suprised if its 6 layers. Now add a layer of peel ply - maybe two or three. Now clamp your mould down over the top. You'll need to arrange something to hold it in place firmly.
Leave to cure.

Remove mould
remove peel ply

If laminate is well below the surface or the rest of the boat go back and add more layers or carbon, if its within a millimetre you're OK.

When the laminate is at the right height fill any holes or low points with filler and epoxy, sand down any high points

Remove parcel tape with squished out epoxy on, double check surface now absolutely level with the rest of the transom and correct if necessary. Drill the two new lower holes for the fitting, paint white, bolt on fitting again.

While this isn't an especially hard job its got muchos hassle about it. Possibly not the best task to be your first epoxy/carbon job.

Alternatively you could ring up RS and ask for a price. You're hardly going to have the first boat that has hit a rock with the rudder blade and bashed the transom a bit... You'll probably end up paying 60 quid to get all the materials you need, although you'll also have 90% of it left afterwards, so if they charge anything under three figures its probably worth getting them to do it.





Edited by JimC